TIMES PICAYUNE NEWS
6-20-07

Local film
takes viewers to execution

Steven
Scaffidi won't divulge everything about his new
film that tracks a condemned man's route to the
electric chair.

"Execution," which premieres Tuesday night at
McAlister Auditorium on the Tulane University
campus, is a 90-minute tale of the ultimate
punishment. Advertised as containing footage of a
real electrocution -- recorded years ago by
hidden cameras that two filmmakers stashed in a
death chamber -- the movie is meant to be
mysterious as to what is real and what is
manufactured drama.

"I'm not
trying to be evasive," Scaffidi, 50, said last
week at a Harahan coffee shop. "Is it real? I
think that's what the audience can decide. At the
end of the day, you're going to know what's real
and what's dramatized."

The New
Orleans native said he wants the viewer to absorb
the depiction of the death penalty in vivid
detail.

"My goal
is to take the audience and put them on the front
row of an execution," he said. "This story is a
myth. Parts are real and not real."

"Execution" follows two filmmakers determined
to capture an execution in a Southern state, and
stars a former Mississippi prison warden who
presided over executions, a former chaplain at
the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola who
counseled convicts during their last breaths, and
a man who spent 16 years on death row, Scaffidi
said.

In the
film, the three men play the roles they served
out in real life. William Neil Moore is the
"condemned man" in the script, reliving his
all-too-real experience on Georgia's death row
until the state parole board commuted his
sentence to life in 1990, according to the film's
press kit.

Spared
after relatives of his victim pleaded for
clemency, Moore today is a free man who works as
a preacher in Rome, Ga.

"No one is
beyond redemption, even people on death row,"
Moore likes to say when he speaks across the
country on the subject.

Donald
Cabana, the former warden at the Mississippi
State Penitentiary at Parchman, appears in the
film as "the warden," while the Rev. Joel LaBauve
is "the priest," having earned the role by
spending six years at Angola ministering to
doomed convicts.

All three
will host a panel discussion after Tuesday's
screening.

Six years
in the making, "Execution" isn't meant to change
anyone's opinion on the legal ritual, Scaffidi
said. "The film is not going to make a
statement."

The film
is not for anyone under 17 years old, he said,
and he shrugs off any suggestion that "Execution"
is an exploitation of the grim topic.

Who is his
target audience?

"Anybody
who has an opinion about prison life and the
death row," he said. "Is it right? Is it
wrong?"

Scaffidi
made headlines with his 2006 documentary
"Forgotten on the Bayou," which chronicles
Hurricane Katrina survivor Rockey Vaccarella, who
after riding out the storm on his roof, decided
to tow his FEMA trailer to Washington, D.C., to
have dinner with President Bush.

"I set the
whole thing up," he said of Vaccarella's Oval
Office trek, yet another film from his Ghost
Rider Pictures company that he started in
1990.

His
previous works include "The People's Story," a
documentary about survivors of Hurricane Mitch's
wrath in Honduras, which he said was a finalist
for the 2000 Academy Awards, but didn't receive a
nomination.

The
University of New Orleans graduate has spent
almost a lifetime making movies -- he made his
first as a 10-year-old with a Super 8 camera.
About 15 years ago, Scaffidi met up with a
condemned inmate while working on a film segment
for an HBO special. He couldn't come up with the
convict's name the other day, but he remembers
that after spending time with the inmate,
Scaffidi's emotions ranged from revulsion to
pity.

"I hated
him," Scaffidi said of the murderer. But after
following him all the way to his state-sponsored
death, the filmmaker found himself crying after
the man's execution. "I cried and I found that
struggle within myself. Feeling sorry for a
killer."

Scaffidi
said he has conflicted feelings about the death
penalty. "I flip-flop," he said.

These
days, Scaffidi, who grew up in Carrollton and
Lakeview before his family moved to Kenner, is a
full-time filmmaker, settled back in Kenner with
a wife and three children, ages 20, 18 and 14,
all of whom Scaffidi plans to take to Tuesday's
screening.

But he's
still not answering every question about
"Execution," including whether the condemned man
is based on a real convict, or where exactly the
"hidden" footage came from.

"One day
we will, but not now," he said. "Let the film
play."

The
premiere of "Execution" is sponsored by the
Tulane University Criminal Law Society. Admission
is free. Doors open at 6 p.m., and the film
begins at 7 p.m.

. . . . .
. .

Gwen
Filosa can be reached at
gfilosa@timespicayune.com or (504)
826-3304.